Now that the Coronavirus has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), we also look to Finland to ask: are the Finns doing well? Let’s get to it.
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Finnish doctors and patient treatment
We have rarely talked about the Finnish health system here in the blog, that is true.
Finland has in the last years tried to import some health professionals from other countries, as it has been chronically understaffed. We did talk in the Spanish version of this blog with a few Spanish nurses that made a new life for themselves working in Finland. If your Spanish is good enough, you can check out our interview here [5].
How is the country doing in this area? Well, Finland is used to be on top of most international rankings, pretty much in every regard. Unfortunately, when we look at the efficiency of Health Systems, Finland ranks 24th [6].
And thus, many in Finland complain about the Finnish way of doctors delivering care to you: take Ibuprofen (or Bepanthen) and go home. This may not work for this pandemic.
Are people happy with how the Finnish government is handling the Coronavirus pandemic?
Finns confirm that in centers like Terveystalo (Finland’s private health care) during the first days people were not being tested and they referred them to public hospitals only. There were cases where people asked again and again to be tested for coronavirus and were denied. They were forcing these people go into quarantine. Now, of course, in exchange for 195 euros they do [7] perform those tests.
Other problems included not isolating patients who have been in contact with people who could have it, like in this case:
Therefore, although Finland started having Coronavirus cases later than Sweden (Ruotsi) or Norway (Norje), if we put the contagion data for all those as starting on “day 0”, we can see that the contagion rate may be greater.
You can see in the following image that Finland followed the pattern until the sudden spike in the number of cases. The source of the image is the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
Luckily the Finns can be less afraid of running out of toilet paper than other nations because they have a hose next to every [8] [8]toilet [8].
If you want to keep up to date with how the Coronavirus is affecting Finland – although in the next few days we will bring you more posts on the subject – this page [9] is updated daily with the new information.
At the moment it seems that no drastic measures are being taken and people – as we have seen in this post – don’t trust their government too much to stop the Coronavirus in Finland.
How do you see this pandemic from your perspective? What do you think should be done?